Lego Heads

Tutorial links
part 1 - MASH setup : https://youtu.be/pRz_jLURwqw
part 2 - aiSwitch shader : https://youtu.be/VPvqz_7ElUg

Another personal work which started as part of a tutorial I planned about aiSwitch shader in Arnold for Maya to show how we can use it to apply multiple textures onto objects procedurally. This might be the stupidest render I have made in terms of the render time. Because it took me 20 hours in my laptop to render this. Because I used 20, 8K resolution textures in the scene for the Lego heads, which later realized to be unnecessary. 2K textures were seemed to be enough because a single Lego head texture comes really smaller in the scene. Later I tweaked the texture resolution and re rendered. It still took 10 hours, even with denoise. I have used a single shader for the Lego head textures with aiSwitch shader to apply it on the Lego head geometries. I have used aiColorJitter node to make the shader apply head textures randomly to each geometry. Used MASH instancing to create the Lego heads. At first I was only planning to render it with a single dome light because it was about the shading. But later seeing the lighting, I wanted to do a more dramatic lighting to create visual interest. So I tried gobo lighting on the render. You can clearly see how much interest the gobo lighting creates compared to the HDRI lighting. Used Maya and Arnold as the key tools for the work. Didn't use any compositing or lens effects on this. Rendered with depth of field from the Maya itself.